


a bra and a ket

by handschuhmaus



Series: Applied Passions [3]
Category: Discworld - Terry Pratchett
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Historical, Gen, Physics, Sexism, also it has witches in a more Discworldy sense still, but probably within the two decades before Equal Rites came out..., not thoroughly researched, well slightly it's... not intending to be precisely historically accurate
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-03-19
Updated: 2018-02-22
Packaged: 2019-03-22 11:13:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13762932
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/handschuhmaus/pseuds/handschuhmaus
Summary: Esme Weatherwax (and Mustrum Ridcully) takes on the fundamental functioning of the universe. And the silly prejudices of the other people trying to learn about it.





	a bra and a ket

**Author's Note:**

> In which I will continue making my favorites do physics and also eventually drag Dirac for _not learning linear algebra_ (fine. yes. he had an excuse) despite the fact that I really can't claim to have much understanding of his system as yet.

Esme Weatherwax really had no ideas about leaving the mountains. It was her view, however much it might have been influenced by the people around her, that she was going to be the local witch. That she was going to have power and influence and take care of her own quarrelsome, often foolish people, on her own land.

There were, mostly, three reasons why she didn't do that.

The first, probably, was Lily. Lily didn't think their town--no, village--was storybook enough, but it didn't stop her wanting to be Glinda the Good herself. It was very hard to witch at cross purposes with your own sister, even if she was convinced of her own goodness beyond what was warranted by evidence.

The least important was when Hughnon Ridcully walked into their kitchen as though it was a public shop, asked for a poultice for a twisted knee, and told her he was off to divinity school in the same city where his brother was studying some other subject. 

But the most galvanizing was getting told that well, yes, physics is the way to understand the universe, and math the language in which it's written, but no-- _women don't do either._

* * *

She spent most of a year in high school at cross purposes with the science teacher. He was the one convinced that women didn't do physics. And, even though it says in the library that Madame Marie Curie received a Nobel prize for physics, Esme knew, perfectly well, that it's true. 

All you have to do is actually look at the women around and what they are doing. Theirs is not a community where many men have leisure time to go thinking about something that they think probably won't affect their lives, let alone women busy with babies and laundry and gardens and canning and sewing and cleaning. And it does affect even their lives, it certainly does, but there are only a few bookish sons that everyone thinks will go off and study. The last time many of the local men ended up at college, having come back from the war before she was born, they never returned home. They went off and settled in other towns, where life was... easier.

Yes, it's true that science brought them the radios, the televisions some families have (it's not a wealthy community), cars, freezers, telephones... but it doesn't just ...care for people, usually.

Esme wanted to do both. Not that she had a lot of respect for academic authority, but she'd snuck a book about plants, which read like someone's journal, a few years ago, and she thought she liked scientists better than she did some people, what with their observing the world around them.

* * *

This is how the world works: there are forces and energy and mere humans have a hope of predicting movement; but this is also how the world works, that light is a particle and a wave and so is everything, no matter how it may seem, and this too is how the world works now: every single scientist, discoverer, they mentioned, is male.

Esme is not, and for the most part she thinks physics is more sensible than men, who after all get into pissing contests over ridiculous things and can't seem to show a sheep's common sense when they're interested in some girl. She wishes Gytha Ogg wouldn't encourage them.

"It's just fun," she says, winking at the Carter boy. "You used to be pretty fond of that Ridcully as I recall."

Yes, Mustrum Ridcully. He was two months younger than her and a particular two months that had made a great difference in their school years, since she was only almost too young for her class, while he actually was and therefore ended up as the oldest in his. He also was wrapped up in his own notions but he seemed to like her. More than most people, aside from probably Gytha for all that she argued with Esme all the time. They had gone out walking, more or less, but nothing had really come of it. He had gone off to more school; he was one of those bookish sons, but then he also came from a family with land.

She had thought Lily would change her mind and leave too and it wasn't as if she was really doing what people needed, but trying to make up for her deficiencies would hardly help things along. Esme'd be seen as disrespectful and Lily for her real incompetence and the village might just lose out altogether on having a witch.*

* * *

"Maybe you should go," Gytha pipes up, taking a swig of enriched cider, as they sit on a blanket in the late summer evening at the outskirts of the first-harvest fair. 

It's not a conversation Esme likes to credit with prompting her to go, probably because she isn't proud of how it went. "Women don't." She'd just seen Hughnon for his poultice Monday.

"Then you could be the first."

"It's in the city, Gytha. The _city_."

"So what? I don't care about what Lily says. Just cause she's witching here don't mean you ain't a witch, Esme, and witches ain't afraid to walk among even city people."

Esme takes a deep breath, and gulps the rest of her own cider and then starts home, only she detours to lie out in a decidedly mundane fields, stare up at the stars, and marvel at how far that light has come to reach her eyes. 

Despite what she told Gytha, she knows there are women out there studying at this point. They probably don't come from her mountains or talk like her, but it was nonsense, men's nonsense, that said women _couldn't_ do it.

She didn't sleep that night but goes home and packs in the pre-dawn blackness, and arrives in town to ask for a ride to the train station from one of the farmers who is selling some of his cattle with the light of dawn.

TBC

 

*strictly speaking this is not true, however, other nearby witches would have disapproved and probably seen to their being dis-hatted before sending someone else along.

**Author's Note:**

> How much more should you expect of this? I really don't know. Incidentally, if you know why they chose to split bracket up into _bra_ and ket, I'd like to know.
> 
> It's not exactly easy from a writing perspective getting Esme to do something aside from witching.


End file.
